Commonplace

Games

I care a lot about games. I've been playing them my whole life; I studied game design under Jesse Schell in graduate school, I've designed a few games.

TagQuantity
1029

Games I would recommend out of this collection - in particular, I think these give more than they take in terms of time and energy.

For groups

Interactive fiction

Interactive stories that earn their runtime:

  • Graham Walmsley's The Thirty Nine Steps (~2 hours) adapts the Buchan spy thriller into a well-paced story world.
  • Jim Nelson's According to Cain (~3 hours) is thematically ambitious and features wonderful, moody writing.
  • Drew Cook's Repeat the Ending (~6 hours) at first blush hews to conventional adventure game tropes, but then thoroughly subverts them with a chorus of paratextual voices and interactions whose meaning is realized by the ending.
  • Obsidian's Pentiment (~15 hours) is a work of thematic and artistic ambition, scope, and historicity. Mostly linear with both immediate branching and long-term global variables influencing the ending.
  • ZA/UM's Disco Elysium (~25 hours) uses choices to explore where we find hope in a world of despair. It lets the player prioritize aspects of the protagonist's personality, and allows quite a bit of nonlinear exploration within a linear overall plot.

Alleson-approved

Games I Made

TagQuantity
31

Professional work

Schoolwork

Side projects

To document:

  • Jedi Knight II maps, maybe?
  • Extensions to Tim Alvey's DOTA-like Warcraft 3 game in 2007.
  • Building the sailing ship / archipelago DOTA-like with Tim Alvey in 2007.

The Mines of Memory

Collections

Oddities

  • It looks like I haven't spent significant time with any games that start with the letter 'X'. You'd think I would have played a bunch of some X-Wing or X-Men game by now, or even X-Files.
  • Games with one-letter names: N, R

To be catalogued

This project started in this spreadsheet but I'm gradually moving it to this wiki (250+ to go). A sampling of games I still need to document here: The Fox in the Forest, Iota, Metroid Prime, Too Many Ninjas, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, Orion Trail, Rinkworks games, Lumines, Ridge Racer (PSP), LocoRoco (PSP), Burnout Legends (PSP)

Virtual friendly: Coup, Spyfall, Drawphone, One-Night Ultimate Werewolf, Jackbox, Contact, Enigma / Decrypto (netgames.io)

To-play

Games I still intend to play, especially those that have been recommended to me.

Games marked “owned” but not “played:”